I am feeling very excited about my world.
We have got a new shed.
It is ages and ages since we have had a shed, until this very day, and now we have got a new one.
Best of all, it is a bit like the old one. It is huge and open and wonderful, and we are going to put the camper van in it.
We went to look at it today.
We were supposed to be meeting the lady from the estate agent there at two o’clock, but she was running late with all of the tiresome about-to-be-Easter Lake District traffic, and so we had to wait for her. Whilst we were waiting obviously we had a thorough exploration, because it is that terribly sad thing, a farm that is no longer farming, and there were lots of empty buildings.
The people who were farming it can’t afford to do it any more, and the people who own it have decided to rent the farm out as holiday cottages, and all of the barns and dairies and milking parlours and cowsheds are being let to anybody who wants a cow-poo strewn shed.
Obviously we were the ideal tenants.
When the lady turned up she was young, and bouncy, and had a dog with her, which made us know that she would be all right, and she said that the shed we wanted had been let to somebody else but we could have a look at the others. We looked and said we would have anything that had a doorway large enough to admit the camper van. The camper van is very tall indeed. It is three metres high.
We looked at one which had a doorway which was three metres and four centimetres, which we thought would do, since the camper van is not likely to start dancing around on tiptoes, and agreed we would rent it, but ten minutes after the lady had left she telephoned and said that the one we wanted in the first place had not been let after all and so we could have that if we liked.
Obviously we did like, very much, and she said she would send us the paperwork on Monday and we would fill it all in.
We are going to have a shed.
It is utterly magnificent. I could not be more pleased, and we talked all the way back about what we would do to the camper van now that we had a shed in which to pull it to bits.
I should tell you that it is becoming very, very anciently rusty. This is because it is forty two years old and spends its entire life sitting in a puddle in the middle of Windermere, apart from occasionally trailing over the Cairngorms to Scotland, which of course it no longer needs to do.
Mark said robustly that of course he could fix it, because over the years he has become very adept at getting rust off the camper van.
We were halfway home when we had the brainwave of going to the camper van shop to poke around their shiny new camper vans in order to get some new design inspiration for renovating ours. We pretended that we might like to buy one, which obviously we didn’t because they were a hundred and thirty thousand pounds, which we don’t have, and in any case we have got a camper van already, even if it is rusty.
The man might have worked that out from the look of us, but nevertheless he unlocked a couple of them for us to look at, and I can tell you now that we were absolutely enchanted. The people who design and build camper vans are very clever indeed. We looked and measured and thought and frowned and thought a bit more, and then we thought we knew what we were going to do.
We are going to pull ours to bits completely. We do not need beds for children any more, because we do not think that the children will ever want to have a camper van holiday ever again, certainly not by the time we have finished it, because it will probably take a couple of years by which time Oliver will be twenty one.
That is sad but probably true, although we have got so many utterly brilliant memories that it doesn’t matter. We have had some ace camper van times, and they can remember them with happy nostalgia now that they are grown up.
We are going to take out the children’s beds and move the bathroom and kitchen and make it all streamlined by making the roof join on to the roof of the cab. We are going to have a beautiful curved bed at the back and it is going to be as shiny and perfect as the one in the camper van shop, or at least as perfect as we can manage with an angle grinder and a hammer.
It is all very exciting indeed. We did not at all want to come to work tonight. We wanted to rush out to the camper van and start unloading everything so that we can start work straight away, but of course it is about to be Easter, so we had to think about earning enough money to pay for it. It is going to cost a very lot of money but not as much as a hundred and thirty thousand pounds so it is positively a bargain.
It does not matter. We are going to have a wonderful shiny exciting streamlined camper van and already I am thinking of things I can paint on it.
It is going to be magnificent.
All in our thrilling new shed.
